Just in time for the holiday season, Google products has tightened up their “Products” search. In the past things seemed a bit scattered and not completely logical. My guess is that some of the experimentation with Google Base has led them to include certain fields. The ability to add your own fields to a Google Base product gives them quite a bit of information regarding important fields for particular item types.
Google Products might just be best suited as a mobile application. This new search interface leads me to believe that it is going more in that direction.
The next 12 months will be incredibly interesting in the phone market. It seems like there are a number of folks who will be entering the space. Two of the biggest names are Google (GOOG) and Skype (owned by Ebay). The entries are not confirmed, but ask a cell phone tech company, in the valley, if they are working on anything for a Google phone and you will probably see some tight lips, or hear “no comment”. Of course a couple of beers later during an “off the record” conversation should reveal much more.
Is this a case of the ‘grass is greener’? My bet is that this is a case where many people are starting to see the capability that will come with something like WiMax. With the money behind it (Intel), this will be a reality.
It appears that the Skpe phone is gearing toward functions like no cost PTT (push to talk) to other Skype users. Logical.
In any case, I have to believe that this will be good for the end user. Better hardware and more competition. What to choose… iPhone, gPhone, ePhone?
When things are frustrating, and have a simple solution, I like to share.
When you are a doing a data update, you will often have a text field in a form that will bring an apostrophe with it. For example, if I am collecting business information, I could have a visitor enter their company name. The name might be Amy’s Gems. If I do a sloppy insert statement like the one below, the query will fail. <cfquery datasource="#application.dsn#">
UPDATE customers
SET companyName='#form.companyName#'
WHERE id=#recordID#
</cfquery>
If you are allowing your users to update or insert their own data, this will error out (with IIS and MS SQL DB running CF8) when your user includes an apostrophe in the field.
You can avoid this by enclosing your values in a cfqueryparam. In fact, getting into the habit of using cfqueryparam in every instance will be a much more secure method and will reduce your exposure to malicious attacks such as a SQL injection hack.
The above query would now look like… <cfquery datasource="#application.dsn#">
UPDATE customers
SET companyName=<cfqueryparam value="#form.companyName#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar">
WHERE id=<cfqueryparam value="#recordID#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer">
</cfquery>
Happy coding. This simple fix might keep someone from pulling their hair out. You can avoid all kinds of cfreplace and cfset statements and end up with an app that is more secure.
When you are researching a product or service to integrate into a web site, it is often difficult (and time consuming) to find out about how solid a product or service might be. You can search for “product name here” reviews or “product name here” feedback, but you can’t be sure that you are finding an unbiased voice. The web allows a 12 year old programmer to appear as substantial as a 50 person company that has been around for 20 years.
Instead of doing the ‘reviews’ search, try something different. You can locate leading resources and solutions in roundabout ways.
For example: When trying to figure out what shopping cart solutions are solid and will likely be around for a while, search for payment integration guides. The Paypal integration guide will provide a list of shopping cart providers that are probably fairly solid. https://www.paypal.com/en_US/html/SolutionsDirectory/sd_ec-compatible.html
Think a little outside of the box when looking for reviews.
Keywords to remember
integration
installation
guide
fact sheet
manual
Searching this way can lead you down interesting paths.
If you enjoy technology, spy movies (sort of), and movies like the 40 year old virgin, you will probably like “Chuck” on NBC. My hope is that it doesn’t start playing too much to the less tech crowd (geek) as networks often do. It is great for a laugh on Monday nights.
Did anyone else notice the recent Apple (APPL) commercial that displayed the monitors for the new iMac and finished with a keyboard and mouse in front of the unit. Very sleek.
Did you also notice that the mouse was on the left hand side? Think different, you right brained folks.
Microsoft Adcenter has come up with a revision to the way they handle trademarked terms in Adcenter ads. It is essentially saying this
Advertiser: Get permission.
Trademark Holder: Make sure you police your trademark.
This policy is essentially like throwing kids into a school yard and asking them to play nice. If you don’t play nice, yell for the teacher. We’ll get there when we can.
Here is an excerpt from the trademark policy email MSFT just sent out.
What’s changing?
It will now be the advertiser’s responsibility to obtain permission from the trademark owner to use a trademarked term in their ads. It will also be the trademark owner’s responsibility to address ongoing incorrect usage of their trademark term(s) directly with third-party advertisers. Microsoft adCenter will no longer intercede to obtain permission for the advertiser wanting to use a trademarked term.
What does this mean for my search advertising?
Your ads may display next to other ads that contain your trademarked terms.
Affiliates, resellers, and third parties may show up against queries for your trademarked terms.
Competitor’s ads may show up in search results against queries for trademarks in certain scenarios, due to match types other than exact. For example, if a generic term is included in the overall search query, advertisers who bid on the generic term may show up in the search results.
I can’t say that I blame Microsoft for changing this policy. What will be most interesting is to see how they handle the Trademark Concern complaints.
What proof will the request to display that you have permission to use a trademark?
What proof will the require that a trademark holder is, in fact, the trademark holder?
There are a lot of questions. If they were a bigger player in the PPC field, it would matter more. For now, it is just an interesting topic.
Shouldn’t the bottom line be about relevance? I am not completely sure that I understand the point of a paid link being considered as something as evil and taboo. If I am running a shoe store and I have the opportunity to pay for a link in a blog about basketball shoes, should I? Of course I should. It is relevant and useful for the visitor of the basketball shoe blog and for the visitor to my site.
Instead, the search engines like Google feel it is “better for the user” if I create some B.S. link bait to get other sites to link to mine. How can you say that me creating a silly “throw the ball in the basket game” and getting other sites to link to mine (many off topic) is better than me spending $20 a month advertising via a link purchase. I just don’t get it. How is the more value to the user by generating link bait? There isn’t.
Greg Boser brought up this point at SES. He asked why coming up with irrelevant link bait is rewarded while purchasing a relevant ad on a niche site violates Google’s guidelines.
Google, please get your head around this one. At the very least, lay out your reasons.
Yahoo SM, formerly Overture, publishes coupon and promotion codes all of the time. If you have registered a business, incorporated, or signed up for a free Yahoo Local listing (view the ventureN local listing as an example) you might have recieved a promotional code from Yahoo Search Marketing. If not, try this… USDM0149. This is worth $100 credit on a new account or $100 savings on assisted setup.
Visit using this link and you will see the promo code prefilled:
http://sponsoredsearch.yahoo.com/growbusiness
They folks over at Blogs and Bucks go into a bit more detail and show a simple method to look for a particular code that will give you $100 on a $5 open.
Is the value of a backlink going to diminish at some point? Paid links are frowned upon by Google (just read www.mattcutts.com/blog for more) and yet we have major companies pitching the value in selling you a back link.
DirectoryM is one such company. I received an e-mail a short time ago that pitched a backlink and the SEO value that it would provide your site. Link Selling.
Contextual Backlinks
Single Region: $9.95 per month
All Regions: $147.75 per month
These premium links are designed for maximum SEO benefit through:
* Contextual Focus
* Regional Orientation
* Trusted Branded Directory Origination
* Flexible 30-character display… Match the display link text to the key word/phrase of your choosing
* Direct link… Link directly to any page on your website
Will this hurt DirectoryM? How about Businessweek or BizJournals. This is a clever way for the companies who use the DirectoryM listings (businessweeek.com and bizjournals.com to name a couple) to insulate themselves from link sales. At least that is what you might think. At the end of the day, a web site is responsible for their own site.
The next 12 months will be incredibly interesting in the phone market. It seems like there are a number of folks who will be entering the space. Two of the biggest names are Google (
